The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [87]
The truth was, Emily knew that she didn’t have anyone but these people in Bethel. Her mother-in-law? She might phone her in the morning, but then again she might not. What precisely would she tell her? And given her mother-in-law’s drinking—given the reality that her mother-in-law was a drunk—what assistance could she provide? Absolutely none. After Flight 1611 had crashed, two days had passed before she called her son, and, though Chip wouldn’t share with Emily the details of the conversation, he did say that his mother had told him fatalistically that it—an accident of this magnitude—was bound to happen. Emily imagined she could phone her theater pals in Pennsylvania or some of the lawyers with whom she was friends in her old firm, but what were they supposed to do? Drop everything and come to New Hampshire so they could hold her hand and help nurse her husband back to health? That was what mothers and fathers and siblings did, and she had none. Since her parents had passed away, she didn’t have any family at all.
Emily realized that she desperately needed to sleep now, but there was one more doctor who wanted to talk to her, and that was Chip’s new psychiatrist here in New Hampshire. Her husband had only met with him three or four times, but Chip had said that he liked him, and so Emily had called him. His name was Michael Richmond. He had arrived at the hospital just about when the ER physician and the nurse finished stitching up Chip, and he had been allowed to spend a few minutes with her husband after he was admitted. Now the psychiatrist was discussing her husband’s case on the phone with a colleague in Chicago. Emily yawned again and was just about to curl up her legs and lie down on the couch when he returned. He was a tall man, roughly her age, in a white oxford shirt and blue jeans. He had thinning blond hair and a strong face made more handsome by the scars that remained from what must have been a titanic battle with acne as an adolescent. He sat on the couch beside her, in the very spot where John Hardin had been earlier.
“So,” he began, his voice soft and melodic. “You must be exhausted.”
“I am,” she agreed.
“And, I imagine, pretty shocked.”
“That, too.”
“Do you want something to help you relax? Maybe even just a sleeping pill?”
She thought about this. “Yes. I will take a sleeping pill. I will even say yes to whatever you’re offering in the way of antidepressants.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” he agreed.
“Well, let’s start with what just happened to my husband. I really don’t understand it. Did he actually try and hurt himself? I understand his guilt. But the flight was seven months ago. Why tonight? Why now?”
“We don’t know for a fact that he did try and hurt himself. Maybe it really was an accident.”
“You don’t believe that.”
He sighed. “PTSD is a complicated thing.”
“There’s more. There must be more.”
“Has Chip had any issues with anger since the crash? Rage he couldn’t control?”
“Not at all.”
“Frustration that seemed, oh, a little off the charts?”
“Well, there was a door,” she said after a moment, and she proceeded to tell the doctor about the barnboard door to a coal chute that Chip had turned to kindling with an ax. She wondered if that counted as anger he couldn’t control.
“How about with the girls? How has he been with them?”
“He’s been great. Always has been. The issue for me over the years was that he wasn’t home half the time because he was a pilot. Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“Try being a single mom with a job and twin toddlers three or four days a week. When he’d come home after flying for three or four days, the girls would swarm on him. We’re talking seagulls on a Dumpster. And while I understood that it was simply that he’d been away, I always felt a little, I don’t know, inadequate. And unloved. No, that’s not right: less loved.”
“But you realized this was an inaccurate perception.”
“Intellectually. Not viscerally,” she said, and she regretted that somehow this discussion was starting to